The Speech Production Assessment Package

This Package comprises the Hidden Pictures Speech Assessment book, which, as noted above, enables the examiner to obtain a comprehensive sample of a child’s use of all Aboriginal English and Standard Australian English speech sounds (single consonants, consonant clusters and vowels).

The creation of the Hidden Pictures Speech Assessment book was motivated by a desire to make saying single words for the purpose of data collection more motivating and to make this task fun and interesting. The very talented author and artist of Wiradjuri descent, Renee Fogorty, has created wonderfully whimsical images which the children will relate to culturally as well as finding them engaging. The added interest of providing two characters that the children search for on each page renders engaging with this task more purposeful and aims to distract the child from focussing solely upon the knowledge that the examiner just wants to hear how they say specific words. This creates a less pressured communication environment. The creation of this more relaxed communication environment then has the added benefit of providing a communication context in which spontaneous and sentence-level discourse may also be observed from the child, hence providing additional valuable qualitative data for analysis.

The data set obtained by administering the Speech Production Assessment Package enables the speech pathologist to analyse the child’s speech production development in a number of ways including:

• Phonological process analysis;
• Phonemic analysis;
• Consistency of speech production;
• Production of vowels and diphthongs in monosyllabic and polysyllabic words;
• Production of monosyllabic and polysyllabic word shapes.

Format

The Hidden Pictures Speech Assessment book is a picture book consisting of seven full-colour illustrations. Each page depicts a different scene where the stimulus words are represented in picture form for the child to name. The seven scenes consist of: Character Introduction Page, At The Beach Page, Birthday Party Page, At The Farm Page, In The Bush Page, At School Page and Camping Page.

Sample page

Character Introduction Page

This page introduces the two characters who appear in interesting places throughout the book. The illustrations are bright and colourful and are guaranteed to capture the child’s attention and imagination. Children of all ages will delight in trying to find these two fun-loving characters on each page; sometimes they may be easily spotted while at other times, they try their best to remain elusive!